:Of course you won’t,: Caryo said, very, very quietly. :And you shouldn’t. That would be wrong. How can you leave it behind you when it’s a part of you?:
The feeling that Caryo had somehow put comforting arms around her only made her sob harder. But Caryo didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that.
:They keep telling me stupid things like “Time will heal it—”: she said, around the sobs that shook her entire body.
There was an ache in Caryo’s mind-voice that matched the aching of her heart. :Time doesn’t. All that Time does is make it more distant, put more space between you and what happened. It doesn’t heal anything. I don’t know how or what does the healing, but it isn’t Time.:
:Oh, Caryo, I miss him so much!: she cried.
:So do I.:
Somehow, that was exactly the right thing for Selenay to hear; it let loose another torrent of weeping, but this time, it seemed as if she was weeping herself out, until at last she lay there, curled in her bed, her nose stuffed and her eyes sore, her pillow soggy—
:Turn your pillow over, love.:
She sniffed hard and obeyed without thinking, and closed her aching eyes. She was exhausted now, limp with crying, and if the ache in her heart didn’t hurt any less, at least she was too tired to cry any more.
:I keep thinking, if only I’d gone after him—:
:If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world,: Caryo sighed. :The best thing that I can tell you is that there is nothing that could have happened that would have allowed you to follow him. And there was not one scrap, one hint of knowledge or even Foresight that any of us had that would have let us guess what he was going to do, or enabled us to prevent it. If there was ever a moment in history where a man took his own fate in his own two hands, that was it.:
:Then I wish I could go back—: But there was no use in pursuing that line of thought. She couldn’t. No one, not even in the tales of before the Founding, had ever said anything about being able to go back into the past and change things.
:I don’t want to get up, Caryo.: And she didn’t. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to leave her bed. Ever. The weight of depression pressed down on her and filled her with lethargy. She wanted to close her eyes, and fall into oblivion, and never come out again. She didn’t exactly want to die—but if only there was a way to not live—
And Caryo didn’t say any of the stupid things that other people might, about how she “had” to live for Valdemar, or how she was being hysterical, or overreacting. :If you don’t get up, I’ll miss our morning ride,: she said instead, wistfully, as if she was deliberately misunderstanding the “I don’t want to get up” as merely meaning “this morning,” and not “forever.” Maybe she was.
But—the thought of the morning ride, another of those times when she could forget, for a little, as Caryo moved into a gallop, and she could lean over that warm, white neck and let the movement and the rush of air and the rhythm all lull her into a kind of trance, that same state of not being that she was just longing for—that broke through the lethargy. It was hard to tell why, but it did; it made her decide that she had to get up, to keep moving, to try for another candlemark, another day. And as she forced her legs out from under the covers, it occurred to her that as long as she just kept moving, even if she didn’t find any peace or escape in movement, she might at least find a little more distraction.
Distraction. She had to distract anyone from knowing she’d been crying, or they’d want to know why, and then there would be all that stupid nonsense that she didn’t want to hear.
She slipped out of bed and went to the table where a basin and pitcher waited; she splashed some of the cold water into the basin, and bathed her face until she thought that most of the signs of her tears were gone. Her eyes were probably still red, but with luck, no one would remark on it. After all, with all of the snow glare out there yesterday, probably they’d think it was that. If anyone said anything, she’d claim it was snow glare. And maybe she could claim a headache, too, and cut the Council session short.
She blew her nose, and went back to her bed, and crawled back into it, feeling as exhausted as if she hadn’t slept at all.
:Just close your eyes,: Caryo advised. :They’ll expect you to sleep late after last night. You really did look lovely, you know. All of the young Heralds, at least, were saying so. I can’t speak for the Bards; they don’t have Companions to gossip about them, but the Heralds were very taken with how you looked.:
:They were?: That was—if not comforting, at least it was satisfying. Nice to know that she did look as good as she had thought.
:Believe it or not, even Alberich thought so. In fact, I think he might have had just a twinge of jealousy when he handed you off to Orthallen.:
Well, that penetrated the lethargic depression, a bit. :Alberich? Surely not.: And anyway, it was probably only that he disliked Orthallen. Well, apparently the feeling was mutual, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that. When two men decided to take a dislike to one another, there really wasn’t anything to be done about it. It was like trying to get a pair of dominant dogs to be friends; no matter what you did, each of them was going to be certain that he should be head of the pack, and all you could do was to try and keep them separate as much as possible. Orthallen was one of the few people who didn’t say anything stupid about her father. He didn’t even say that she ought to be over her grief by now, and that made him one of the few people she felt comfortable being around, even if he did tend to treat her as “little Selenay” instead of the Queen.
Besides, it wasn’t Alberich that she wanted to make jealous.
Though, on second thought, there really wasn’t anyone in her entire Court or the Heraldic Circle she wanted to make jealous. Honestly, if the whole business of trying to get her to marry someone who was tied to a whole pack of special interests was put aside, the real reason she didn’t want to marry any of the Council’s choices was that they all bored her. There wasn’t one of them that was worth spending an entire afternoon with, much less a lifetime. There wasn’t a single unattached male in the entire Court that even gave her a flutter of interest.
She was just so tired of it all; tired of the ache in her soul, tired of the loneliness, tired of trying to outmaneuver the people she should have been able to lean on. It seemed as if her entire life was nothing more than dragging herself through an endless round of weariness and grief, and she just wanted an end to it all.
She buried her face in her pillow, not to muffle more sobs, but to block out—everything. If only for a moment.